LONDON, 22 August 2003 — After the latest attacks on coalition forces and now UN personnel the US must be wondering why the original script, so persuasive in its simplicity, has become so distorted and bitter. Instead of freedom there has been a struggle of sectional, if not national, liberation against the occupying forces. What was supposed to be a re-enactment of the landing on the Normandy beaches in 1944 looks like the descent into the Vietnam quagmire after the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964.
What has gone wrong? To begin with, the US message of liberation has never been unadulterated. It has been said that there are two Americas, that of the Declaration of Independence and that of the CIA and the Pentagon. “Our commitment to liberty is America’s tradition”, said George Bush aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, but he also announced that “the United States upholds these principles of security and liberty in many ways”.
Of course all conquering nations argue that they are exporting liberty or civilization or both, and end up exploiting them and suppressing opposition in the name of security. The French Constitution of 1946 said that the French would never use force against the liberty of any people, and that at a time when they were putting down nationalist revolts in Algeria, Syria, Vietnam and Madagascar. But few are deceived by their own rhetoric of liberation as much as the Americans are, or so ill-equipped to understand that an occupied people might not see things in the same way.
The original script was that Saddam Hussein would be toppled by a clinical strike, and the Iraqi people would embrace freedom and the forces that brought it. But how separable is a dictator from the people he rules? And how far can a regime be changed without an impact on that people?
On May 1 Bush said that with new tactics and precision weapons, “we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians.” This not only glosses over the huge number of civilian Iraqi casualties but also ignores the historical truth that if there is one thing that has triggered nationalist revolt it is foreign occupation.
“No one likes armed missionaries,” said Robespierre in 1792, even before French revolutionary armies surged across Europe, and within a generation French occupation had fueled nationalist revolts in Germany and Italy, Spain and Russia that brought down the French empire.
In the absence of state power and regular armies, such nationalist revolts are undertaken by informal groupings and irregular forces. These may be denounced as terrorists, saboteurs and bandits by the forces of occupation, but one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.
Were the tactics of the French resistance any different from what we now see in Iraq? Even if they did not have oil pipelines to blow up, they sought to undermine the German military machine by cutting communication cables, bringing down power lines, derailing troop trains and throwing bombs into restaurants frequented by military personnel. They are hailed as heroes.
The German occupying forces responded to such attacks with a ruthless policy of collective reprisals.
Oradour-sur-Glane, a French village near Limoges which was thought to be harboring terrorists, was razed to the ground by SS troops in June 1944; 642 civilians were killed. Where the populations were considered racially inferior the reprisals were even more savage: There were 700 shot in the Greek village of Kalavyrta in 1943, 2,300 in the Yugoslav town of Kragujevac in 1941 and 23,000 Jews the same year at Babi Yar outside Kiev. The Americans, operating as the occupying power within the Geneva convention, do not have this option.
Can the Americans, torn between the need to impose order while preaching the gospel of liberty, learn anything from previous occupations? The passage from occupation to liberation in France in 1944 was relatively smooth, for two reasons. First, while leading political figures associated with the puppet Vichy regime were purged, local government continued virtually intact.
The playing-card figures are being rounded up in Iraq, but it would be unwise to purge everyone who has been identified with the previous regime.
Deals will have to be done with politicians and notables who are not squeaky clean, because only they can provide the infrastructure that the country desperately needs. Second, the transition from dictatorship to democracy promised by the coalition must proceed as fast as possible. Of course there are risks in holding elections, but democracy, as Abraham Lincoln said, is government of the people, by the people, for the people, not on behalf of the people, for the Americans. De Gaulle prevented the establishment of an Allied military government in France in 1944, and made possible the transition from servitude and division to national independence and unity. It is a pity that in Iraq the alternatives to the previous regime seem so divided and inadequate — that there is no Iraqi De Gaulle.
— Robert Gildea is Professor of Modern French History at Oxford University. His book on France under German occupation, Marianne in Chains, was published in the US by Metropolitan Books this month.